


The Major Deegan

by backfire



Category: Veep (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Episode Fix-it, F/M, Season/Series 07
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-04
Updated: 2019-04-04
Packaged: 2020-01-04 14:39:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,043
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18345722
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/backfire/pseuds/backfire
Summary: “I meant what I said before,” she continues. “I’m not asking anything of you.”“I know,” he repeats. “Open the door, Ames.”“I’m giving you an out,” she says, sounding desperate now, like she doesn’t want to believe what she’s hearing.“Open,” he says, tapping against the wood.





	The Major Deegan

**Author's Note:**

> What’s the point of fan fiction if I can’t use it to make pretend that Dan’s not a total piece of shit for like two minutes? 
> 
> AKA what we all wanted to happen with the connecting room situation in 7x01.

“I’m thinking of having this baby, and I’m not asking anything of you—literally nothing—but I do want the baby to know that you’re the father, but I don’t want your last name because I’ve always loved the name Meagan and I don’t want people to think that I was going for Meagan Egan because that sounds like someone who gets ass fucked on the Major Deegan in a limerick.”

Amy says it all in a single jumble of word vomit without taking a breath, stopping abruptly for a long inhale when she finally loses steam. She immediately looks like she wants the floor to swallow her up.

“Woah,” Dan says, processing it all. But he sees the look on Amy’s face—that’s a look he’d recognize anywhere. She’s got the manic panic in her eye like she’s going to snap. His wheels turn quick; his first response is to calm her the fuck down and prevent the explosion. “I like the name Meagan too,” he says. It’s the first thing that comes to his mind to divert her bottled up internal fury. Plus it’s not entirely a lie. It’s a nice name, Meagan.

She doesn’t immediately respond, which for Amy is a good sign. But she’s got the look again, the one she always gets—her mouth all pursed and tight at the corners like she’s pulled a drawstring around her words, shoulders tensed up somewhere around her ears, eyes panicked and expressive and angry. So Dan tries again, because he knows her, knows what to say to calm her down just as much as he does to rile her up.

“Although the Deegan’s always congested, so…,” he trails off, trying to keep his voice light. It comes off slightly awkward and—Dan Egan’s never had an awkward phase in his life, so trust Amy Brookheimer to bring it out of him.

Amazingly, she takes it, shoulders relaxing a tad. “Yeah, the Cross Bronx is much better for butt stuff,” she says without missing a single beat, expression still as serious as ever.

There she is. 

It makes Dan laugh, a genuine chuckle. Not because it’s particularly clever or funny—at least not comparatively to half the shit that flies around the campaign office—but because it’s so _Amy_ , biting back with repartee that matches his completely and perfectly when a nanosecond earlier she’d been on the verge of bursting like a shaken up soda can.

The moment’s over, though, the tenseness returning as the subject matter of the conversation comes back into Amy’s head. He can see the shift in the split-second it occurs, her guards back up. “Okay, well, just sleep on it or whatever,” she says. And then she’s spitting out a hurried good night and slamming the door in his face.

He rests his forehead against the solid wood, softly so that she won’t hear a thud. _Fuck,_ he thinks vehemently and whispers it out loud a few times for good measure.

Aside from the night Amy had dropped the bombshell before the Madison-Monroe dinner, he hadn’t really given much thought to the baby. Amy is smart, after all, sharply career-driven. And he’s seen her around children before, it’s an intensely uncomfortable experience for all parties involved. Not to mention they’re on the eve of announcing the fucking campaign and Selina would scream and scream and scream if the spotlight got taken off her for even a second. He really had no reason to think she wouldn’t get rid of it and thought she’d already done as much before she’d brought it up again in Cedar Rapids.

Meagan, though. It actually is nice, no matter the idiotic rhyme. Meagan Brookheimer—that’s a name he can see in a headline someday, splashing across the outlets, crossing the lips of anchors. It’s an all-American name, just the right amount of syllables, just the right amount of hometown charm. Wait— _what the fuck is he talking about?_

There’s no headline. There’s no Meagan—it’s not even a thing yet. Surely it’s too early for Amy to know it’s a girl, that much he knows. 

Does he? He quickly does the math in his head, she must have already been a few weeks along when she told him in November… _fuck_.

Something rises in him, rearing its ugly head, something he hasn’t felt this viscerally since the scare in that restaurant with Danny Chung when he thought Selina was going to be leaving the Hughes ticket after all. 

Dan recognizes fear—he sees it every day in the eyes of interns and low-level staffers, he can smell it in the water when there’s a fuckup bound to lead to a firing.

But when he pulls out his phone and texts Cheryl from Buzzfeed News, he’s not doing it because he’s afraid. He’s doing it because...because—he’s _Dan Egan_. It’s who he is. Or at least he tells himself this much.

—

When she texts that she’s on her way to the hotel, Dan decides it’s time to bite the bullet and knock on Amy’s door. 

Amy looks somehow relaxed, particularly given their last conversation. She reminds him of a college student lounging in her dorm, her hair tousled and hanging loose across her Penn t-shirt, cheeks rosy and eyes clear and reading—oh, Amy. The irony of the author’s name is not lost on him.

But when he tells her he’s going to fuck Mike’s boss, everything tightens up. Her legs stop swaying casually where they’re crossed at the ankles, her eyebrows draw together, her lips do that aggressive purse before she’s opening them to give her forceful encouragement, which sounds like she can barely hold it together. Of course she’s mad. It’s an asshole move, which had been his intention.

But Dan would be penniless if he had to give a dime for every time Amy’s been upset with him, so he tries to brush it off best he can and heads down to the lobby bar when Cheryl texts him she’s almost there.

To his surprise, Amy’s at the bar too, no doubt having stormed out in frustration after his announcement. She’s sitting there in nothing but her pajamas, shivering in her Penn t-shirt and shorts and slippers, her phone clutched in her usual deathly grip. She’s not staring at it for once, instead angrily nursing a glass. He can read her mood in the the way she’s sitting, the line of her back rigid and unyielding, her jaw working overtime in grinding her molars down to dust.

Amy hasn’t noticed him yet and he considers going over to her, but Cheryl walks in just then, so he goes over to greet her instead. Out of the corner of his eye, he can see Amy’s head snap up so quickly at the sound of his voice across the small bar that he thinks she might have given herself whiplash.

Dan steals a glance at her while he’s pulling Cheryl’s bar stool out for her—she’s livid. Color is flushed high on her cheeks and her eyes are wild and her shoulders are tense and—and her mouth is slack, the drawstring is parted, revealing... she’s hurt.

At once, Dan realizes that he’s again miscalculated Amy Brookheimer. She’s not just angry with him because he’s being a shit. He recalls her word vomit, the way she’d jumped right in, head first without a parachute into the baby talk. The manic look in her eye, barely concealing the vulnerability underneath. How she’d immediately depressurized when he’d been cooperative—

She _cares_. She wants him involved.

And then he’d gone and been an asshole about it, on purpose. But only because he thought she’d be regular pissed, not...not _Nevada_ -level pissed. Not pissed because she’s been _hurt_ , by him of all people. He’s seeing it now, how her nonchalance and casualness at the whole thing that he’d taken for character development was really just a thick, cold, rolled steel wall to keep him out for her own sake. Yet he’d managed to slip through anyways, this time without even knowing it, without even meaning to, like it was the most natural thing to do.

He feels like someone’s clubbed him in the chest with a titanium crowbar, cracking his ribs wide open so that everything he pretends not to have comes spilling the fuck out and he can’t stop it, can’t stop the disgusting rush of blood and organs and—and _feelings_ and—

It’s categorically impossible to talk to Cheryl while Dan’s in the middle of having this epiphany. He gives stunted, monosyllabic answers as she tries different angles with him, first questioning him interview-style about his role as Deputy Communications Director, then getting flirty and tracing the rim of her finger around her glass and looking at him through her long eyelashes. He can barely see her through the vision he has in his head of Amy sitting on her bed, dutifully soaking up Sheryl Sandberg’s words of wisdom to working women through eyes that had expressed so much in that hair’s breadth of a moment from across the bar.

Cheryl’s hot, of course, and smart and successful. Hits all of his points, really, but—well. It would have been easy, had he been ignorant to the fact that there’s a _choice_ between this willing woman directly in front of him or Amy, tired and upset and retreated to her room to brood.

It really is Nevada all over again.

Only the first time, Dan hadn’t known there was a choice to begin with and the fallout had been apocalyptic to say the least—he didn’t get talk to his best friend for a year and had to suffer through watching her hang off the arm of the world’s stupidest Hank Williams impersonator.

It doesn’t even boil down to the sex, he realizes, though he could tout all day and night about Amy’s particular prowess there. The choice is different this time, clearer and flashing in front of him like the stupid CBS “on air” sign that hung right above Stevie’s overly waxed and buffed head. 

Keep Amy, or lose her.

“Why did you ask me here tonight?” Cheryl is saying. She’s keeping it together remarkably well, her eyebrow arched and her tone polite, though Dan can tell she’s annoyed at him. He would be too. That seems to be the general mood of the evening, really.

“I don’t know,” Dan says, nerves worn too thin to give an answer other than the tired truth. “I shouldn’t have.”

Cheryl doesn’t respond, just raises her brows and gives a pointed glance across the bar at the seat Amy had vacated. Hot, smart, successful, and perceptive as hell, then. Dan really hopes she doesn’t think this is interesting enough for a story, but then again she works for fucking Buzzfeed News. What is she going to do, publish a listicle called “15 Ways to Tell That a Guy Doesn’t Want to Fuck You?” 

“Good night,” she says graciously instead of questioning him further, standing and gathering her things together.

Dan tries to feel regretful as he watches her leave, but he’s never been one for lying to himself. And, well. It isn’t really a fair choice to begin with, was it?

—

After stepping cautiously around Gary’s sleeping figure at the threshold of Selina’s door—seriously, he’s going to have lapdog fodder that’ll last him decades—and letting himself back into his room, Dan takes a second to think, really _think_ about his next steps.

What should he say to her? What would she respond to? Is she even awake?

There’s a sliver of dim light coming from the narrow gap between the connecting door and the carpet, so no. She’s probably sitting upright in bed, fuming and pretending to read.

He feels weird, like he’s outside of his own body watching himself just stand there in the middle of his hotel room staring at the door like it holds the secrets to the universe. His hands open a close around empty air a few times and he, out of sheer power of will and a year’s worth of on-air practice, forces them not to be clammy.

Fuck it. He’s overthinking this.

He crosses to the door in two long strides, moving before he gives himself the chance to back down. The door, revealingly—unsurprisingly—is unlocked, so he just barges right in with no preamble.

“So when were you going to tell me you were in love with me?” is what Dan leads with. Which is definitely not a line he would have gone with if his brain hadn’t immediately short circuited the moment he opened the door and forced the first Egan-ism out of his mouth before he could wrap a proper thought around it. 

But hey, that’s what Amy’s into, right? She’d fallen for him without him even really trying. Much. She liked the real him, which itself was a terrifying, electrifying thought, one that he hasn’t really given himself time to fully parse before charging head first into the volcano that is Amy’s fury.

Amy is indeed propped up in bed against her pillows, though her phone is clutched in her hands rather than the book, which has a dent in its spine and is lying haphazardly strewn near the headboard. The moment Dan bursts in, though, she goes rigid and still, head snapping upwards to look at him like he’s the stupidest motherfucker she’s ever had the misfortune to lay her eyes on and she can’t believe he’s exceeded her stupidity standards by breaking into her room.

And then she’s scrambling out of bed at lightning speed so she can stand up and glare at him accusatorily. “What are you doing here?” she hisses, crossing her arms in front of herself. “You can’t just barge into my fucking room.”

Dan doesn’t immediately respond, somehow lost for words at the sight of her, at the magnitude of what he’s _doing_. Amy looks angry as ever, her hair even more unkempt than when he saw her earlier in the evening, her eyes wild and furious, her cheeks flushed and pink, her arms closing herself off to him even though she’s learning forward, like she has to unconsciously hold herself back.

She becomes even more enraged at his lack of response it seems, because she flies towards him in three angry strides, finger raised like it’s a weapon.

“If you think you can come back here just because Ms. Buzzfeed is smart enough to realize that your limp dick isn’t good enough to make up for the fact that you’re the world’s actual largest, most prolapsed, gaping _asshole_ —”

“You never told me,” Dan cuts her off, an urgency in his voice that he doesn’t think he’ll ever be able to recreate for show. She stares at him, open-mouthed and expectant. He swallows, speaking lowly. “I never knew.”

“What the fuck are you talking about? I literally told you in _November_ —”

“I’m not talking about Meagan, I’m talking about _you_ , about your...your—”

“What did you just say?” Amy looks stunned, the cloud of anger momentarily cleared and replaced with pure shock and some deeper, unidentifiable swirl that’s only there for the barest of moments.

“I’m talking about how you—listen, I _know_ now, I get it,” Dan tries to insist, but Amy holds up her finger again, shushing him.

“You...called her Meagan.”

Had he? He hadn’t even realized—it had just sort of slipped out, he supposes. It felt natural in the moment.

“I mean,” Dan says. He quirks one side of his mouth and gives a tiny shrug.

For a second, Amy truly looks like she’s going to slap him.

And then she’s on him like a woman possessed—her hands go around his neck and for a wild fraction of a second, Dan really thinks she’s going to choke him out. But then those hands slide around to grab at the back of his head and pull their mouths together.

It’s a messy kiss, the spontaneity of it bringing them together with no finesse. Amy’s thumbs are resting on either side of his jaw and she’s pressed herself close against him while Dan, the moment she drags his face down to meet hers, makes a shocked sort of hum. But then his brain catches up and kicks into gear and he winds his hands around her waist, pulling her completely flush against him. She makes a small noise, so Dan angles his face just so and opens his mouth over hers and their lips slot together, everything falling into place. Amy’s making another noise and her arms are around his neck now and one of his hands is in her hair and she’s trying to press herself even closer against him and, Jesus, her belly is pushed up against his, with their baby inside there and it should be downright terrifying how _right_ it all feels but instead Dan just feels warm inside, some previously untapped emotion rising up in his throat and out of his mouth and right into Amy.

But then without warning she’s shoving him off of her. She curses and doesn’t stop pushing him, all the way back through the threshold of their connecting doorway and into his own room. The door is slamming and the lock is turning, clicking heavily into place as Dan stands there, dumbfounded.

“Amy,” he says, speaking into the wood. He can hear her still standing just on the other side, breathing heavily. He taps against the door with one finger, a low thud. She doesn’t respond.

“Come on, Ames,” he tries again, leaning his arm up against the hinge. He can’t recognize his own voice, but he doesn’t care—he _needs_ her to open that door again.

“Why are you doing this?” Amy asks him, her voice muffled by the solid door between them.

Dan swallows, his throat suddenly bone dry. Truthfully, he doesn’t quite know himself—it had just seemed like the thing to _do_. There’s no _why_ —breathe, blink, think, go after Amy. Just like that.

Amy scoffs at his lack of response. “You can’t just come here because you’ve gotten second wind.”

“Ames, you _have_ to know that nothing happened between Mike’s boss and I. You know that,” he says, frustrated.

“I don’t _know_ anything, Dan. I haven’t ever pretended to know what you want from me.”

“Ames…”

“What did you mean, before? When you said you never knew?”

“I—” Dan starts. He scrubs a hand across his face, pinching the bridge of his nose and continues stiltedly, “At the bar. When you saw me. I never really knew before—I mean I knew _before_ when we dated, but I basically orchestrated that. But not this, so it was like, I just—”

“Get to the fucking point, Dan.”

“I know now,” Dan says lamely, not knowing what else to say. God, he is a fucking moron.

“Know _what_ , you fuck?”

There’s a long pause before Dan answers, the silence between them rushing in his ears. “How you felt. Feel. About me.”

When Amy speaks again, she doesn’t deny it.

“So let me get this straight,” she says, her voice strangely calm. “You came back because _you_ , the biggest shit in the world, thought I was going to cut you loose for sleeping with Miss ‘12 Things You Never Knew You Didn’t Give a Fuck About.’ And you felt bad about it, because you suddenly realized how I felt.”

“...I guess.”

He hears Amy sigh through the door. “That is the most selfish thing I’ve ever heard in my entire fucking life,” she says. “And we work for _Selina Meyer._ ”

Incredibly, she doesn’t sound like she’s angry—just tired.

“Well, you know me,” Dan says, twisting his lips wryly.

He hears Amy’s forehead thump against the door. “Ames,” he tries again, speaking softly. “Open the door.”

“I want to have the baby, Dan,” she says, her voice shaking, but determined.

“I know,” Dan says. He does know—there’s no way she would have brought it up to him earlier in the night if she hadn’t already made the decision for herself. He realizes now that he’d known it then too, just chosen to ignore it. The magnitude of what that will mean for him—for them—is not lost on him. In fact, it’s all he can think about.

“I meant what I said before,” she continues. “I’m not asking anything of you.”

“I know,” he repeats. “Open the door, Ames.”

“I’m giving you an out,” she says, sounding desperate now, like she doesn’t want to believe what she’s hearing.

“Open,” he says, tapping again against the wood.

“You have to know what this will mean if you do this,” she whispers. “You have to know.”

“Amy. I know.”

The lock clicks. The latch turns back and the door opens.

When he kisses her, she leans up for it, eyes closed, long lashes fanned out against her face, lips parted and sweet and Dan thinks it’s the most romantic he’s ever seen her in his life.

The kiss doesn’t stay sweet for long, though, growing filthy as Dan presses his hands under the hem of her t-shirt and slides his tongue against hers, slick and hot. She pulls him backwards and they’re falling onto the bed.

Maybe it’s because of the raw vulnerability of what they’d just shared, but for some reason, Dan can’t stand to be apart from her, even when she pushes him away to pull her shirt over her head and shimmy her shorts off. He holds her against him as she does so, pressing his open mouth against her shoulder, the nape of her neck, her ears, her hair.

Amy must feel the same, because curses at him when he has to lean back to divest himself of his own clothing and then doesn’t let go of him the entire rest of the time, not even when he’s sliding into her. They’re both still upright in the bed, she’s on his lap and has her arms wound around his neck and he, God, he can’t look away from her face as she grinds, slick and wet and hot, down onto him.

It’s so different than that night after Dan had gotten fired—then, they’d loudly, drunkenly fucked on every horizontal surface of Amy’s shitty New York studio, crazed and insatiable.

That feels worlds away from now, when he’s breathing into her mouth and holding the cradle of her hips as she rocks against him, shuddering and moaning in her throat when she hits her orgasm.

When Dan comes, thick and hot inside of her, she presses her forehead against his and kisses him sweetly.

Afterwards, when they’re lying curled together under Amy’s rumpled sheets, Dan says, “I think Meagan Brookheimer is a very presidential name, don’t you?”

Amy makes a noise of indignation and promptly tries to smother him with a pillow, going on a diatribe of how he could even _think_ about tossing a literal baby into the viper’s nest of American politics, does he want to see her become like Selina, the both of them are already fucked up enough as it is.

Dan can tell that she agrees with him, though.

—

In the morning, too early for it to be time to get up yet, Dan wakes to a mouthful of Amy’s hair, her head tucked under his chin and onto his chest, their legs twined together. Her belly is pressed against his side, warm and soft. In the dim light of the room where no one can see him, Dan smiles before closing his eyes and drifting off for another few hours.

And then they’re being awoken by a pounding at the door and incredibly, it’s Selina’s voice on the other side. Dan has never known her to do in-person wake up calls, even at her pissiest. But she’s screaming and screaming about how she knows they’re hooking up, Gary had said so, there’s a Buzzfeed News article and how dare they do this to her on the eve of her fucking campaign announcement, America _owes_ her this and she wants a fucking _war_ , damnit.

“Fuck,” they both sigh.

**Author's Note:**

> Now that I think about it, titling this fic as such really makes it sound like I was going to write about them doing butt stuff. Oh well, next time I suppose.


End file.
